Mission Statement

The Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition (GLC) is supported by the Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale University. Our mission is to foster academic excellence in the study of slavery and its enduring legacies, to make this knowledge freely available to the public at large, and to foster work toward social justice. We do this by sponsoring international conferences, the Frederick Douglass Book Prize, workshops for teachers and students, online book talks and panel discussions, a podcast series, research fellowships, and publications. In this time of widespread pushback against the teaching of historical truths about slavery, we maintain that only through an honest reckoning with the past can we craft a just future.